Like so many sons of the '60s, Karl Marlantes found the odd path to Vietnam and the tortuous route back.

He joined the Marine Corps straight out of Seaside High School because, he said, "Those were the days when if you were a guy and an athlete, you had to do three years in the service. That's the way it was." Marlantes, however, was also a National Merit scholar with a ticket to Yale, so he spent the next four winters in Connecticut and the summers at boot camp, even as Nam wormed its way onto the front page of The New York Times.

He was set to go active in the summer of '67, but he won a Rhodes scholarship, and the Marines, suitably impressed, signed off on those two years at Oxford. "I went," Marlantes said, "but I couldn't stay. The friends I went through training with were going over and getting killed. I thought I was hiding behind privilege. It was either desert to Sweden or join my friends in Vietnam."

He was in Morocco, living --drifting, really --off his Oxford scholarship funds when his duty became clear. He showed up at a U.S. naval base in yellow curls and a djellaba, smelling like a camel, and announced, "I'm 2nd Lt. Marlantes."

He reached Nam in the fall of '68. His buddies told him he must be the stupidest Rhodes scholar on record --Marines, Marlantes concedes, aren't known for supportive chitchat --and he spent the next year scrambling off CH-46 Sea Knight helicopters and listening to mortar shells land in the soft pockets of former friends.

He survived. He remembers hearing an old hymn in the distance when he realized he would escape alive. Still a young man, he spent a year at Marine Corps Headquarters, then returned to Oxford, where the Rhodes warden, E.T. Williams, had kept his scholarship open should he ever need it again. He graduated to nice suits, a chauffeur and an international consulting business.

"And," Marlantes says, "I'm starting to see dead bodies on the boardroom table. I'd look out the window and see firefights going on. Every time I got on an elevator, if I were alone, I'd burst into tears. I'd be trying to get it together before the door opens again."

Shell shock, they called it then. Soldier's heart. No one had slapped a label yet on post-traumatic stress disorder. Not until 1994 did Marlantes, at his wife's suggestion, attend a symposium on stress in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was describing his symptoms when the psychiatrist stopped him and said, "Were you ever in a war?"

And he finally took the turn toward home. The problem with the elevators? When the doors opened with that hydraulic hush, they sounded just like the ramp of the CH-46 as it opened to release the Marines from the helicopter to the hell below.

"Some people never get it," Marlantes says. "Their entire lives are wrecked by it. They're the ones living up in Alaska, drinking beer and hiding out."

He lives outside Woodinville, Wash., and wakes up early each morning to write. El Leon Literary Arts has just published his novel on Vietnam called "Matterhorn," which you can pick up on Amazon.

"I wanted to write a good story," Marlantes says, a story about race and politics and how tiny mistakes, so inconsequential on the street, have such dire consequences in country.

He still believes "the only way people can have any clue about the experience of others is through literature." If the stories in his novel are as memorable as the ones he told me on the phone, "Matterhorn" will be an unforgettable climb.
-- Steve Duin; steveduin@news.oregonian.com